IceCube Wins 2013 Breakthrough of the Year

The IceCube neutrino telescope — a international collaboration in which University of Maryland astrophysicists play a major role—has been named the “2013 Breakthrough of the Year" by the British magazine Physics World. Physics World made the award based on the collaboration’s recent first detection of cosmic neutrinos, as well as its ability to overcome the many challenges of building and operating a kilometer square detector under the ice at the South Pole.

“The ability to detect cosmic neutrinos is a remarkable achievement that gives astronomers a completely new way of studying the cosmos,” says Hamish Johnston, editor of physicsworld.com. “The judges of the 2013 award were also impressed with the IceCube collaboration’s ability to build and operate a huge and extremely sensitive detector in the most remote and inhospitable place on Earth.”

University of Maryland astrophysicists designed the IceCube data collection system and the software—called IceTray—being used by UMD and all other project scientists for analyzing data from the observatory. It took some 10 years to design, construct and fine tune the telescope.

“We are gratified and excited that an achievement which our community of astrophysicists thought was very important and exciting, has been recognized more broadly in the physics world as the major breakthrough of the year,” says UMD astrophysicist Gregory Sullivan, who leads the University of Maryland's 12-person team of contributors to the IceCube Collaboration and recently served as the International Spokesperson for two years.

According to Sullivan, a cosmic neutrino detector the size of IceCube is something people have been thinking about for decades, with preceding detectors laying the scientific, technical and logistical groundwork for IceCube.

The use of subsurface detectors to study neutrinos was begun in the 1960s by UMD graduate Raymond Davis Jr. while he was a scientist with Brookhaven National Laboratory. Davis, whose solar neutrino discoveries won him a Nobel Prize in physics, led the first detection of solar neutrinos in 1968 using a detector built 4,800 feet underground in the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota.

Over subsequent decades the science and technology of studying solar neutrinos and cosmic rays has advanced with new detectors built underground, underwater, and under ice. These developments paved the way for the IceCube telescope. University of Maryland astrophysicists, led by Professor Jordan Goodman were involved in a number of these pioneering efforts, including Milagro, a National Science Foundation-supported observatory near Los Alamos, New Mexico that detects neutrinos through tiny flashes of blue light, called Cherenkov light, produced when neutrinos interact with ice and the Super Kamiokande experiment in Japan that was designed to study nucleon decay, solar neutrinos and supernovae neutrinos.

“In about 2000, the University of Wisconsin, lead institution for IceCube, invited the University of Maryland to participate in its new IceCube project because of UMD expertise and experience in solar neutrino and cosmic ray detection,” explains Sullivan.

“Our interest and experience in neutrinos and with photo detectors and software systems like we used for the Super-Kamiokande detector were a perfect fit for the planned IceCube project and the UMD, UW ‘marriage’ was clearly a success,” he says.

Sullivan and fellow UMD astrophysicist and IceCube team member, Kara Hoffman note that many of the scientists playing important roles in IceCube and gaining invaluable knowledge and experience are graduate students at the collaborating institutions. John Pretz, a UMD Ph.D. student, produced the first published neutrino result from IceCube, and the first published measurement of a neutrino energy spectrum with IceCube was the topic of UMD student Warren Huelsnitz' thesis, which has been cited  more than 100 times by other researchers.

The Next Big Thing

A new, much larger detection system for astrophysical neutrinos, this one designed to detect those at the highest end of the energy scale also is in the works. Maryland’s Hoffman is leading the development of the Askaryan Radio Array, an Antarctic neutrino telescope that will use radio waves, which transmit best through very cold ice, to detect the particles. Installation of an initial cluster of radio antennae is already underway, with plans for a total of 37 subsurface clusters covering 100 square kilometers.

“IceCube was a big risk going in, but our recent detection of cosmic neutrinos shows it paid off,” says Hoffman. “That finding and this new award also strengthens our case for the Askaryan neutrino telescope and hopefully will lead to full funding for it,” she says noting that its total cost should be less by a factor of 10 than the almost $280 million cost of IceCube.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory was built under a NSF Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction grant, with assistance from partner funding agencies around the world. The NSF's Division of Polar Programs and Physics Division continue to support the project with a Maintenance and Operations grant, along with international support from participating institutes and their funding agencies.

-University of Maryland, College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences-

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